The limits of open justice

On the face of it, the Romanian-operated Globe24h.com web site looks innocuous. But at a recent gathering of administrative lawyers at the Ontario Bar Association, the general counsel for Canada’s privacy commissioner devoted time to talk about her office’s concerns with the site.

Globe24h positions itself as a law library, and contains in its database decisions from Canadian courts and tribunals as well as case law from other countries. It collects the cases from court and tribunal web sites or repositories like the Canadian Legal Information Institute, but unlike web sites like CanLII, Globe24h allows these rulings to be indexed by search engines like Google, which means searches for name would turn up decisions in which that person is mentioned.